


Not Cleopatra-esque

by lalaietha



Category: Slings & Arrows
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-20
Updated: 2009-12-20
Packaged: 2017-10-04 17:54:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,399
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/32843
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lalaietha/pseuds/lalaietha
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She'd never planned on being a widow.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Not Cleopatra-esque

**Author's Note:**

  * For [gritkitty](https://archiveofourown.org/users/gritkitty/gifts).



> This was my main assignment for 2009 and man, I found it tougher than I expected! I started and restarted several times. The optional details requested to stay away from the fluff, and I may have overcompensated. I hope it's enjoyed, regardless. :3

Ellen sat in the window and smoked her cigarette.

She had quit. In fact, quitting had become its own sort of habit. It was, like so many things, Geoffrey's fault - not that he ever bothered her about smoking, or its effects on her health, or anything else. Quite the contrary. It was his fault because he'd been so aggressively indifferent, other than the occasional remark about how if the house burned down around them in the night, it would be her fault. So she had run the whirligig (that was such a Geoffrey word, damn him) of the Quitting Train, off and on, with all the appropriate drama, mostly to get him to pay attention.

Sometimes he'd obliged her. Sometimes they'd even had a really good fight about it. Sometimes he didn't, so they didn't. It really depended. It was the unpredictability of the thing. She supposed that was what made it fun, if "fun" was the word for anything involving Geoffrey Tennant, which she thought it probably wasn't. Geoffrey Tennant wasn't so much _fun_ as he was _force of gravity_, a body with extraordinary . . . . damn. What was the word for what it was that made something really heavy?

Density.

He would have remarked on the pun.

Damn him, anyway.

Ellen tapped the ash off the end of her cigarette, and brought it back to her lips. At some point, she would have to get up. Get dressed in something more than the black lacy housecoat she was in. At some point. Someone might come by. That sweet girl Cathy, for one. She was always fussing over people. She would have heard by now. Ellen would hate for anyone to see her like this, which was a bit odd, really. She was still (old or not) the theatre prima donna. Really, when it came down to it, this was fantastic drama.

The trouble was, it wasn't the drama she wanted, because Ellen had always intended to die first. She'd never planned on being a widow. She was supposed to die _first_, and leave him mourning her and performing and directing great last plays out of his grief in her honour and to her glory. Geoffrey was well-suited for that. Whenever he'd had a slump, she'd tease him that it was because he didn't have any tragedy in his life right now. Geoffrey turned tragedy into material. It was his _thing_.

She'd told the officiating doctor that. Was it officiating? The doctor who pronounced Geoffrey dead. She'd said just those words, in a distant sort of voice. Not the bit about Geoffrey and tragedy, the bit about herself. _I never planned on being a widow_. The doctor had patted her on the shoulder and told her you couldn't plan for a sudden massive heart attack.

An indignant part of her had wanted to inform him that this was _not_ how you comforted a grieving woman.

The rest of her, body included, had just sat down on the hospital chair and thought that Geoffrey was gone - _again_ \- and this time she didn't even have Oliver here. Or anyone. Then she'd filled out paperwork and said some things to some people (she really didn't remember) and come home and gone back to bed.

She hadn't seen what else there was to do.

And now she was sitting at the window, smoking. Because she still didn't see what else to do. She supposed there was a funeral to arrange. Come to think of it, she might have already arranged it. That might have been what some of the paperwork was yesterday. She couldn't remember.

Also her cigarette was down to the filter. She stubbed it out, wrapped her arms around herself, and stared out the window some more.

*****

When the bell rang, it wasn't Cathy. It was Anna.

Ellen only knew that because after she ignored the bell for about three rings, there came the sound of someone tramping through the snow to underneath the window and then Anna's voice floated up. "Ellen! I know you're in there, Ellen! Please come answer your door! Or, or I'm sorry, but I'll have to kick it in!"

Anna might be a considerably stronger person nowadays, but she still tended to be apologetic about it.

"It's not locked," Ellen yelled back. Or at least, she tried to yell back. She had to give it three or four tries before she managed to get her voice to work. She heard Anna say, " . . . oh." and then the front door opened and the sounds of a person taking off hat and coat and boots just reminded her that it wasn't Geoffrey, because he never made those noises, because half the time he walked all over the house in his God-damned boots with snow and mud all over them and she had to remind him to take that fucking coat off before he got into _bed_.

When Anna opened the door, she made a face. Not that Ellen was looking. Or giving the world the compliment of her attention. It didn't deserve it: it had killed Geoffrey. Ellen stayed where she was, looking resolutely out the window, even when Anna walked over and opened it, blasting them both with Montreal-winter-air.

"What were you going to do when you ran out of cigarettes?" Anna asked, waving her hands around as if it would help the air get out.

"Let the last one fall on the carpet and burn the house down with me in it," Ellen replied.

"Well." Anna almost hesitated, it felt like, but then she said it: "That would be very Cleopatra-esque."

And then the whole world fell on Ellen like a bucket of ice-cold water, and she choked. She coughed. Her hands came to her mouth.

The noise started before the tears did. It started deep in her chest, somewhere behind her lungs, in the empty yawning space that wasn't on any anatomy chart and only opened up when the world was really trying to gut you. It started down there and then danced its way up her lungs and out her throat and into her mouth, getting tinnier and more pathetic as it did so, until it just beat the tears out, breaking down the wall to make sure that when the sobs arrived hot on the tears' heels, they could wrack her whole body all over again.

Like always, it was Geoffrey's fault. She'd only ever cried like this for Geoffrey. Who had promised never to make her play the Nurse, and had promised her Cleopatra. But they'd never got around to it, somehow: never quite got there.

Anna pulled her up out of the chair and over to the bed, where she could sit beside her and let Ellen cry on her shoulder. That was embarrassing, too: Anna's shoulder was (metaphorically) damp with a lot of crying before Ellen's. Hell, that snake Richard Smith-Jones had once done the equivalent.

Hell. Damn. Fuck.

Anna just petted her hair. And Ellen cried. For a long time. It didn't make her feel better. It wasn't catharsis. There was nothing cleansing about it. But by the time she was cried out and sniffling, she at least had her sense of - well, no, it wasn't humour. But it was something. Over there beside the ache.

"No, Cleopatra was all about leaving a _pretty_ corpse," she replied. She took the tissue Anna handed her. Where had Anna got the tissue, anyway? Was she carrying it in her damn pocket? Ellen dabbed at her eyes. She sat up. A little. She struggled with something to say for a moment, and what came out was, "Did you know Geoffrey used to see Oliver, haunting that fucking theatre?"

Anna patted her hand in a way that was simultaneously friendly and comforting, and made Ellen want to scratch her eyes out. "Everyone with ears knew Geoffrey used to see Oliver, Ellen," she said.

Ellen looked sideways at her. She didn't mean to ask, "Do you think I'll see Geoffrey?"

Anna didn't answer right away. She just squeezed Ellen's hand, and Ellen found herself with less motivation for the eye-scratching. "Well," she said, finally. "I'm sure we'll all know, if you do."

"Fuck," said Ellen. Because there didn't seem much else to say. "Now I have to arrange a funeral. I don't know how to arrange funerals."

Anna squeezed her hand again. "I do," she said.


End file.
